Ghost towns and space ships

Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China. A swift transition from flagship real estate project and design utopia, we’ve touched upon Ordos in recent posts, most notably over Ai Weiwei’s documentary about Ordos 100, the city’s stalled super-community of European avant-garde architectural idealism. The Ordos villas (and there were many) exist at the hinterland between the unbuilt, the unbuildable and the very improbable. Lavishly rendered and modelled, the vast majority of the designs never made it off the drawing boards, setting up expectations about the practicality of such fantasy architecture all around the world, not just China.